Phelps

I was curious about Fred Phelps career. I never ran into the man or his cronies, and so all I knew is what I read in the papers: and all sides agreed that the "church" was a nasty group of people, with strong intimations that they used lawsuits to support themselves.

So google around. The Topeka Capital Journal put together a series on his life. It is quite a bit more in depth than the Wikipedia article, but Wikipedia separately flags his civil rights history, which is hard to find in the Journal collection. Interesting. Did he change his attitude to blacks later? The Journal suggests yes, but it isn't perfectly obvious. Both collections touch on Gage Park, but there's no followup, though I recall reading several years ago that the city actually did clean up the park.

I set aside claims that he beat his children with a mattock--others deny it and I'd expect serious damage from such an instrument. But even without those claims, he obviously turned extremely nasty very early on, as witness his suit against Brady.

Years ago I predicted that his "church" would eventually break up over who got the money. I wonder why he was "excommunicated:" whether he had complaints about finances in the "church" or maybe started to have second thoughts about whether all outsiders were damned.

He plainly wanted to be defined by his opposition to homosexuality, so I don't think he can complain too much that his early civil rights work is ignored in favor of the hatred his later years.